The Not-So-Fun Parts

To be clear: what follows is not a litany of complaints. But lest anyone think this is all fun & games, an extensive vacation in increasingly exotic locales, perhaps we should write a little about the sideshows to the main event. Skip to the next entry if you just want the pretty pictures.

Even new boats have issues, and for older boats like ours, there's no question things are going to wear out/break. And with all boats, the constant motion--some of it pretty rough--is bound to cause problems. (Imagine what would happen to your house if it were constantly being tossed around in salt water.) Though boats are designed for this, it doesn't mean they don't need frequent monitoring and maintenance. That's why the dock mantra is "That's boat life!" (Translation: something is always going wrong!)

There's also always at least a slight undercurrent of concern: continuous vigilance isn't pessimistic, it's necessary. (This, of course, applies to weather as well; homeowners on land aren't always watching the weather, in case they need to relocate their house for safety reasons.) Add to that the never-ending list of things that need repair ("cross one thing off the list and add two more" is another dock mantra, and the result is a lot of time in paradise being spent in work clothes.

Here's a photo gallery of just a few of the recent projects:

Though all Nordic owners agree this is a great boat, there's a design flaw that allows water into the V-berth floor when large waves wash over the bow. Art employed an array of tactics to combat this, from caulking & weatherstripping on the outside to fabricating plugs for various places inside...          

...and here he's installing a hose to allow for pumping any accumulated seawater out of the anchor chain locker.

Air in the lines prevented the new watermaker from working properly; Art re-routed the plumbing so it pulled in seawater from a different through-hull (hole in the boat). The next false starts were just priming issues, so now--voila!--we have an onboard source of fresh water! In this photo he's sopping up seawater that came through the hole and into the engine room during this operation. Update: after four successful uses of the watermaker, the booster pump failed. So we crossed 'watermaker' off the list and then had to add 'purchase and install a new water pump'...eeesh!! 

No, this is not the same picture. (Art spends a lot of time
in the engine room.) This is the 'dig out parts of broken bolts and
replace them with new ones' operation.

Deja vu all over again...here he's jury-rigging--with
creative use of plastic bottles--a radiator overflow container.

For some mysterious reason, our VHF and SSB radios (which are not connected to each other) and our Nexus gauges all stopped displaying GPS coordinates on their screens. Art traced cables and wires through crevices and under ceilings to diagnose potential problems (here he's inspecting the main circuit board). Between his investigations and my systems programming, all the screens are now working properly. 

The starboard water tank sprang a leak; yipes! At least it happened in La Paz, where we could find help wrestling the 75-gallon monster in & out of the boat and a good welding shop that could complete a solid repair. 

You'll notice Art was the main character in all these photos. Since I'm not an engineer, I do the other stuff: accounting, business (e.g. insurance, documentation, etc.), provisioning, meal planning, cooking, itinerary (including research on visas, ports, anchorages, activities ashore), routing, navigation, weather, and SSB radio. I'm checking grib files (weather reports) in this photo; that info is received via a 3-way dance between my computer, 

the SSB radio and a modem.